I do enjoy combat. I’m a little hesitant to admit that for … a few different reasons, but, it’s true.
For me, it’s … the satisfaction, I think. There’s a quality in my character-- Saede Riordan called it “killer instinct”-- that finds fierce joy in the killing strike, whether it’s with a laser volley, a pistol shot, or a metal sliver. I do a lot of thinking about it even when I’m not fighting anyone or probably about to fight anyone. Actually, I think that might be the difference between a kill I can enjoy and one I can’t: the feeling of a kill is a feeling of success, of planning and work paying off in the most primal way: “My talons are red. I’ve hunted well!”
Only, if the success is unearned (like when the target is trivial), boredom replaces joy, and that’s sort of where I start as far as how I feel about all this. “Bored” is maybe the most disrespectful way to feel about taking people’s lives I can think of. There’s a feeling of atrocity about that, of human beings lined up in a slaughterhouse to be butchered.
Even leaving aside whether I can enjoy a kill, I want to have more respect than that, at least as a rule. I don’t want to be that person who’s bored while removing fellow sapient creatures from this world.
Further, or otherwise, this quality of mine isn’t … safe.
Usually I don’t really have enough against anyone in this world to really want to kill them, so stuff like “justice” doesn’t enter into it. If I’m opening fire on you it’s probably just because someone’s called you as a target. If the one whose will directs me calls for it, I don’t need any other reason.
Only, that in its purest form … it’s not something I’m okay with being, or becoming. Or becoming again. In the moment, it makes no difference to me, but the next day, and the day after, and the month and year after that? I seem to have have a hawk’s instincts, eager for blood and indifferent to the rightness of it, but I don’t want to look back on my life as a record of lives destroyed.
So if I for some reason can’t or won’t won’t exercise my conscience when it matters, it’s better if my will’s bound to a better person, someone whose judgment I can substitute for mine. Maybe, by having a light of that kind to follow, I’ll develop a stronger moral sensibility of my own.
At least, maybe my existence won’t be such a dark stain on this world as it might otherwise have been.